In an exhibition of 24 paintings at the Dublin Arts Council gallery, artists Luke Ahern, Michael
Ambron and Andrew Ina use experimental and nontraditional techniques to explore what painting can
be: pure alchemy.

Before our eyes, innately hard surfaces are transformed into fields of soft material in Ambron’s
work; Ina’s paintings swell with thick layers of plastic-based acrylic paint; and we become lost in
mazes of patterns created by Ahern.

Ambron does it subtly.
The Light That Consumes and
In the Light are two fine examples. Consisting of heavily textured surfaces (which read
like soft cotton and textured plaster) coated with a spectrum of hazy hues and minuscule
topographical shifts, the paintings challenge visual perceptions. The atmospheric surfaces are so
drenched in texture that, at a quick glance, they seem to be hyper-realistic reproductions of a
rugged landscape as seen from an airplane or satellite.

Ina’s paintings recall the history of abstraction. One image,
Contaminated, is the only painting of his on display that seems to refer to anything in
the outside world. Its horizontal composition and layering of vertical, geometric, and organic
forms refer to a landscape. Thin washes of paint are juxtaposed with heavy fields of white paint
applied so thickly that it seems like plaster.

While Ambron and Ina focus primarily on texture and the physicality of the paint, Ahern takes a
different path. He repeats images and patterns to exhaustion.

His
In and Out Window Arch is a small painting, something that could presumably fit in the
artist’s lap. It contains at least three layers of a simplified line drawing of an arch, repeated
at various scales, until the canvas is dense with them.

Painting today often isn’t about how accurately one can reproduce an image, but, as these three
artists suggest, the physicality of making the painting and a rejection of illusionism.

Ahern, Ambron and Ina aren’t in the business of making pictures. They’re making fascinating
objects, hence the exhibition title, “Uncommon Objects.”